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WE MADE URANIUM!
WE MADE
URANIUM!
And Other True Stories from
the University of Chicago’s
Extraordinary Scavenger Hunt

E di te d b y LEILA SALES

Th e U n i v e r s i t y o f C hic a g o P r ess
C h i c a go a n d Lo n d o n
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2019 by Leila Sales
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case
of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information,
contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America

12345

(paper)
(e-­book)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226571980.001.0001

l i b r a ry o f c o n g r ess c at al o g in g -in -p ubl ic a tion data

Names: Sales, Leila, editor.

Title: We made uranium! : and other true stories from the University of
Chicago’s extraordinary Scavenger Hunt / edited by Leila Sales.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018054723 | ISBN 9780226571706 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 9780226571843 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226571980 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: University of Chicago—Undergraduates. | College stu-
dents—Illinois—Chicago—Social life and customs. | Undergraduates—Il-
linois—Chicago—Social life and customs. | Treasure hunt (Game)—Illi-
nois—Chicago. | Chicago (Ill.)—Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC LD936.W46 2019 | DDC 378.1/980977311—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054723

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–­1992

(Permanence of Paper).
This book is dedicated to all the Scavvies and Judges who
make dreams come true.
C o n t e n ts

INTRODUCTION 1

ITEM 256, 2007: Simon’s a Computer, Simon Has a Brain 7

Sarah Rosenshine

ITEM 24, 2010: The Trainwash 13

Adam Brozynski

ITEM 175, 1987: The First Hunt 18

Diane A. Kelly

List of 12 Trivia Items That Were Challenging in the Age

before Google 23

ITEM 277, 2011: The World’s Largest Scavenger Hunt 27

Ezra Deutsch-­F eldman

List of 23 of the Highest-­Pointed Scav Hunt Items

of All Time 38

ITEM 240, 1999: The Homemade Breeder Reactor 45

Fred Niell

ITEM 289, 2015: The T-­Shirt Cannon 54

Jake Eberts

ITEM 159, 1994: Daddy Issues 59

Jennifer Joos

List of 6 Items That Maybe Weren’t 100 Percent Legal 65

ITEM 161, 2010: Culture Shock 69
Joel Putnam

List of 11 Items Whose Answer Was “Coleslaw” 74

ITEM 42, 2003: The Forbidden Fruit 80

Dave Muraskin

ITEM 32, 2003: We Tempt the Wrath of God 86

Doug Diamond

List of 19 Items That Were Only Slightly Blasphemous,

Honest 92

ITEM 58, 2004: The Girl with the Infamous Tattoo 98

Cristina Romagnoli

ITEM 133, 2004: Does Their Relationship Lack Trust? 103

Nicolle Neulist

List of 16 Items Documenting an Increasingly Esoteric Feud

with Pulitzer Prize-­Winning Journalist Mike Royko 110

ITEM 229, 2013: The Final Feast 115

Naseem Jamnia

ITEM 123, 2001: We Were Survivors 125

Connor Coyne

List of 18 Items about Food 133

ITEM 241, 2013: Graceland, Also 139

William Wilcox

ITEM 20, 2008: ScavAir 148

Steven Lucy

List of 30 Pun Items 156

ITEM 293, 2015: Where There Is No Duct Tape 160
Erica Pohnan

List of 14 Items That Animals Could Have Done Without 166

ITEM 238, 1999: We Like to Party 171

Moacir P. de Sá Pereira

ITEM 47, 2006: A Party at the End of Days 176

Dave Franklin

List of 10 Items That Referred to The Simpsons and One

That Didn’t 182

ITEM 23, 2002: Relite Niteline 186

Matthew Kellard

ITEMS 282—­8 3,
2005: Do That 193
Nora Friedman

ITEM 0, 2015: Seriously, This Is a Real Wedding 200

Christian Kammerer

List of 19 Items Dedicated to University of Chicago Faculty,

Lore, and Campus Life 206

ITEM 58, 2003: ShoreTrisLand 211

Leila Sales

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 217

APPENDIX A: A List of Scav Hunt Teams 219

APPENDIX B: Key Locations 221

INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 1987, on the campus of the prestigious Uni-

versity of Chicago, a group of students held a scavenger hunt.
It was, generally speaking, a normal scavenger hunt. The list
asked for some standard items (e.g., item 39: “A four-­leaf
clover,” or item 106: “A pinecone”); some harder-­to-­find items,
especially since this was in the days before the internet (e.g.,
item 165: “A ball and chain,” or item 142: “A completed Sun-
day New York Times crossword puzzle”); and a few impossible
but humorous items (e.g., item 6: “Bruce Willis (my roomie
wants him, she will pay a bonus for him)”).
Some of the items were kind of geeky in their wording (e.g.,
item 7: “An item that contains Sodium Monourophosphate”—­
solution: toothpaste), but that wasn’t a surprise. This was,
after all, the University of Chicago, which prides itself on
being a welcoming home for nerds, with eighty-­nine Nobel
laureates to its name, a school where on a Friday night you’ll
find a more impressive scene at the library than at a frat
house. According to the T-­shirts, the U of C is “where fun
comes to die,” and this scavenger hunt was an attempt to
revive some fun in a spring quarter that otherwise felt much
too long, cold, and academically challenging.
But that wasn’t where the scavenger hunt stopped. Not
even close.
Over the past three decades, the University of Chicago
scavenger hunt—­now called Scav Hunt—­has grown and
morphed into one of the most bizarre, outrageous annual
traditions at any university. Disregard anything you might
2 i ntroduction

remember from childhood birthday party activities, and for-

get about four-­leaf clovers and pinecones. Scav Hunt is now a
four-­day extravaganza of barely controlled chaos. Hundreds
of students and alumni compete to fulfill 300-­plus items,
all of which can be achieved within a 1,000-­mile radius of
campus. And simply finding things is only a small part of it.
Many items must be invented, built, or performed.
Over the years, competitors have shown that there’s very
little they won’t do for Scav. For Scav, people have gotten mar-
ried, spent four days handcuffed together, gotten permanent
tattoos, eaten their own umbilical cords, taken planes without
knowing where they were going or why, dragged elephants on
to the university campus, been circumcised, built a working
nuclear reactor . . . the list goes on. Participants have poured
their literal blood, sweat, tears, and other bodily fluids into
Scav. (And also bodily solids, as per item 156 of the 2009 Hunt:
“Take a running shit.”) If Scavvies have never killed for points,
it’s only because the Judges haven’t asked them to.
At this point you might be asking why. Why would these
presumably intelligent young adults, students at one of the
top-­ranked colleges in the world, devote their brainpower
and resources to building a human-­sized game of Mouse
Trap or a piano that plays alcoholic beverages? Surely there
must be a huge prize to make all this effort worth it?
No. There’s not. The winning team may get a couple hun-
dred bucks, but I can’t swear to that, and even if they do, it just
goes straight into funding the team’s Scav efforts for the next
year. I competed as a Scavvie for three years before becoming
a Judge, and my team won one or maybe two of those years,
and all I remember getting was some Häagen-­Dazs and a T-­
shirt that I still sometimes wear to the gym. The question of
whether your team wins is generally so unimportant that I
can’t even remember if mine did it once or twice.
The point of Scav is not to win a big prize, and to some
i ntroduction 3

extent it’s not about winning at all. The point of Scav is to do

cool shit. That’s it. And this is a book about some of the cool
shit that Scavvies have done.
There is a story behind every item on the List. You just
can’t eat your own umbilical cord without getting a story to
tell about it. And this book is a collection of some of these
stories, spread over the course of many years of the Hunt,
written by Scavvies themselves. This is not a complete his-
tory, but rather individuals’ unique and unforgettable expe-
riences from the past thirty years of Scav Hunt.

The Four Days

The essays that follow will make a bit more sense if you have
a general understanding of the structure of the Hunt. This
structure has shifted and developed over the years, but it is
always roughly as follows.
There is a panel of Judges who spend the school year
creating the List. The Judgeship is made up of about a dozen
current students, who often have previous experience com-
peting in Scav Hunt, as well as many alumni Judges who
maintain their emeritus status. The Judges brainstorm and
workshop items, debate, vote, come up with wording and
pointing, and ultimately wind up with around 300 items
that constitute the List.
The Judges assign a maximum point score to each item,
loosely tied to how challenging the item would be to com-
plete. A simple “go find it” item, trivia item, or minor “be
clever” item might be worth a couple points (for example,
item 39 of the 2000 Hunt, “A box of Honey Nut Beerios,” was
worth a maximum of 7 points). Each list will also have per-
haps two or three items called “showcase items” that are
pointed in the hundreds, usually large and complicated
construction items. (For example, item 18 of the 2008 Hunt,
4 i ntroduction

“A parade balloon representing a cartoon dog of your choice.

Must be up to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day standards,” was
worth a maximum of 150 points.) But those are in the mi-
nority; most items on the List are worth less than 30 points.
The List is distributed to the teams at midnight on the
second Wednesday of the month of May. This event is called
List Release, and often just getting a copy of the List turns into
a minihunt in and of itself. Maybe it will be ensconced in a
concrete brick, or buried at the beach. The Judges don’t simply
hand it over, because in Scav Hunt, nothing is meant to be easy.
Once the team captains have secured copies of the List,
they bring them back to their team headquarters for a formal
reading of the List, from beginning to end, with the entire
team present. The number and size of teams have varied
widely over the years. Some years they’ve been centered
around dorms, which means there might be only six or seven
teams competing (one for each of the major undergraduate
dorms), with up to hundreds of students on each team. Other
years, the pendulum has swung toward having many smaller
teams, often centered around houses within dorms. Some
teams have been based on student clubs (for example, the
Astronomical Society once fielded a team), and occasionally
a team will be made up of just one person (for example, in
2010, there was Team Lanie, comprising a girl named Lanie).
Once the captains have read the List to their teams, the
Scavvies get to work. They spend all of Thursday, Friday, and
Saturday completing as many items as they can, sometimes
coming together to compete in events like Scav Olympics,
Scavenfeast, or the Friday night party. During this time, school
remains in session, and some Scavvies go to class, though
many do not.
Larger teams have a lot of organization, including page
captains: team members in charge of each page of the List, as-
signing and tracking the completion of the twenty or so items
on their page. Teams may also have committees that specifi-
i ntroduction 5

cally handle construction items, or coding items, or cooking

items. In recent years, many teams have created listhosts and
online databases for keeping track of the status of items.
During these three days, a subset of Scavvies head
out on the Road Trip. Each team can send a car full of
Scavvies—­who must be clad in specific and self-­referential
costumes—­to travel around to sites that the Judges have
identified and complete location-­specific items. This is the
part of the Hunt that must occur within a 1,000-­mile radius
of campus, because at some point somebody determined
that 2,000 miles round trip, split among five drivers, was
the most anyone should attempt in a three-­day time span.
The fourth day of the Hunt, Sunday, is Judgment Day. This
coincides with Mother’s Day (because mothers are so judgmen-
tal). Now is when all the sleep-­deprived Scavvies, including the
just-­returned road-trippers, gather in the campus building Ida
Noyes to present their items to the Judges. The Judges assign
points to each item, depending on how well it has been com-
pleted. The Judges then tabulate the points and announce the
final results. The point spread varies from year to year; in 2017,
for example, the winning team surpassed 3,500 points, the
eighth-place team came in at close to 1,000, and there were a
couple of teams who completed just a handful of items and
came in under 100 points.
After the results are announced, pretty much every-
body cries from exhaustion, cleans up their duct tape and
cardboard, bandages whatever injuries they’ve gained over
the past four days, drinks some water, calls their moms to
wish them a happy Mother’s Day, and completes whatever
schoolwork is due the next day. After that, it’s just a 361-­day
wait until we get to do it all again.
All of the stories you are about to read are set during
that four-­day span. It’s just a few days out of the year. But,
as you’ll see, these are the days when magic can happen.
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO STUDENTS PRIDE THEMSELVES
on being highly conceptual and deeply impractical. Another school
T-­shirt reads, “That’s all well and good in practice . . . but how does
it work in theory?” The U of C offers majors such as “history, phi-
losophy, and social studies of science and medicine” but nothing
so applicable as “premed.” Even those disciplines that could veer
into the hands-­on—­like “computer science”—­are reimagined to be
kept firmly in the theoretical realm. On the whole, students at the
U of C are extremely intellectual, but that does not necessarily
mean that they have much in the way of life skills.
So Scav Hunt is, for many U of C undergrads, the one time of
year when they actually make tangible things. Conceptual physi-
cists figure out how to make neon signs and Tesla coils, theoretical
economists apply game theory, mathematicians crack codes, and
English majors—­as in this first essay—­learn to solder iron.
ITEM 256:
Simon’s a Computer, Simon Has a Brain

Sarah Rosenshine
2007 S CAV HU NT

My Scav Hunt team, Burton-­Judson, was not “small but

mighty.” We were just small. The previous year, my first, we’d
come in sixth place. The year before that we’d come in ninth
out of nine. However, we always read the List with vigor in a
not uncrowded room. And when we read the 2007 List and
I heard item 256, I knew it had to be mine. On Team “BJ and
the Logical Phalluses,” claiming it consisted of the arduous
process of announcing,“I’ll do that.”

256. A. A. A Four. A Four. A Four Trampoline. A Four Trampoline. A Four

Trampoline Based. A Four Trampoline Based. A Four Trampoline Based
Game. A Four Trampoline Based Game. A Four Trampoline Based Game
of. A Four Trampoline Based Game of. A Four Trampoline Based Game
of Simon. A Four Trampoline Based Game of BZZZZZZZ. [200 points]

You remember Simon, I assume. It’s the handheld circular

electronic game with four buttons—­red, yellow, green, and
blue—­that light up in different combinations and then you
have to remember and repeat the pattern. The item was asking
for a re-creation of that kids’ car backseat game—­only instead
of pressing buttons, you would play by jumping on trampolines.
I waited impatiently the next morning for my friend
with a car to return from the Chinese class he’d had the
8 Sarah Rosenshine

gall to attend. We drove to Target and frantically loaded up

his Mini Cooper and debit card with four small trampolines
and an even smaller travel Simon game. They were out of
the regular Simons, snapped up by Maxcock, our on-­the-­
nose portmanteau for the two largest teams at the time (the
dorms Max Palevsky and Snell-­Hitchcock). On the ride back,
I read the dated slogan off the packaging.
“Simon’s a computer.
Simon has a brain.
You either do what Simon says or else go down the drain.”
“That’s weird,” I said aloud, even though I was the one
riding shotgun in a green Mini Cooper with a Union Jack
decal on the roof and four miniature trampolines in the
back. As is always the case with Scav, weirdness is relative.
Back on campus I set to work, opening the game with
the free screwdriver the university had given all Burton-­
Judson residents earlier that year. It came with a keychain-­
sized bubble level and a Snickers bar, by way of apology from
the university for months of deafening daytime construction
on the dorm. A fair trade.
With YouTube still in its infancy, I turned elsewhere for
the very untheoretical knowledge of how circuits work. I
called my dad, an inventor who had turned our cavernous
basement into a workshop that usually hovers somewhere
between Flubber and Frankenstein—­annoyingly, since as a
kid I’d always wanted to turn the basement into a rec room
where I could hang out with friends. But today, an inventor
father was exactly what I needed.
Fully, if briefly, embodying the absent-­minded inventor
stereotype, my dad immediately asked why I couldn’t get
someone from the engineering department to help me.
“You mean from Loyola?” I asked, reminding him that
the University of Chicago didn’t have anything so practical
as an engineering department.
Simon’s a Computer, Simon Has a Brain 9

Reality check complete, my dad took apart an orphaned

TV remote at home and asked if the circuits matched the
look of the board I had in front of me.
“They’re squiggly,” I reported.
“Good. This one is squiggly, too.”
From there, he instructed me to straighten a paper clip
and touch it to the ends of the circuit. Hardly believing it could
be so simple, despite it being called a “simple circuit,” I poked
around blindly, touching all the parts one could conceivably
call an “end” with the more obvious ends of the paper clip.
When the green LED lit up, I did, too. Our captains had been
encouraging (pressuring) me to figure out how to make the
trampoline Simon work electrically, because doing well on
showcase items was the secret to avoiding last place. I wanted
to make them happy, but until that point I’d believed I was
going to have to make it mechanical, with long Tim Burton-­y
arms that would hit the Simon buttons when a player bounced.
Now I had the literal green light to make the cooler version
a reality. From here, I simply needed to solder wires to either
end of the circuit, connect those wires to the bottom of the
trampoline, and then do that three more times. But first I had
to learn how to solder, and also what solder was.
I called home again, where my dad carefully explained
how to prevent overmelting by holding the iron near but not
on the solder, and I thanked him for his patience by immedi-
ately covering an entire circuit with a giant blob. I called back
too late that night, my circadian rhythms already replaced
with Scavcadian ones, hopeful he could explain how to use
wicks, the undo button of the electronics world. Instead, he
told me he’d never used them before.
“Oh, because you’re so perfect at soldering?” I asked,
disheartened.
With time, I figured out I could hold the wick over the
solder like a Band-­Aid, and it would sop up the solder blood
10 Sarah Rosenshine

if I held the iron over it. I didn’t know much about electri-
cal wiring, but for a hypochondriac, cleaning up blood was
second nature.
After more inept soldering and skillful cursing, I finally
held in my hands a James Bondian device of splayed wires
and exposed circuitry. I took a victory tour of the lounge,
looking on as my teammates labored over our Tinkertoy
Strandbeest and a fake moon-­landing video and our copy of
The Little Engine That Just Couldn’t Quite. Scavving on a small
team is like toddlers playing. Working “together” means ev-
eryone working on his or her own thing, but sharing supplies
and encouragement and watching one another take naps.
After enacting an eighties movie montage of bad ideas,
I tried completing the connection between the Simon game
and the trampolines with aluminum foil, again barely believ-
ing it would work. That first successful bounce, in the early
hours of Sunday morning, felt like the highest bounce on
the largest trampoline in the world. I excitedly hugged my
friends and their friends and people I would never talk to
again, reveling in that strange temporary intimacy fostered
by extreme situations.
The captains and I carried the game to Judgment, del-
icately and with great fanfare, like a monarch on a palan-
quin. Worried we would immediately be shown up, I babbled
nervously the whole way. But when I saw my creation in
the grass outside Ida with the rest of the Simons, I felt em-
boldened: aside from the team that smugly announced that
theirs used lasers (it didn’t), the others were either mechan-
ical or looked a lot like mine.
Simon didn’t share my performance anxiety. Though
it was a little quiet because I hadn’t had time to attach a
speaker larger than the built-­in one, my most vivid memory
is of Judge Claire nodding happily after completing three
full bounces. Our team jumped, too, from sixth to fifth that
Simon’s a Computer, Simon Has a Brain 11

year. That joy buoyed me throughout the day, keeping me

smiling even when I was covered in soda, battling bees, after
modeling our Coke and Mentos jetpack. I excitedly called my
dad from Judgment. He also couldn’t believe the aluminum
foil had been conductive enough, but he’d always believed I
could make Simon work. I packed my tiny screwdriver back
into the tiny toolbox, satisfied.
It didn’t live there forever, though. Since that Hunt, I
have watched my own office slowly turn into a room strewn
with half-­finished projects, old computers, and tools, with
the freebie screwdriver still in rotation. It hasn’t reached my
dad’s Frankenstein levels yet, but I’m getting there.
Horror writer Robert Bloch once said, “I have the heart
of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.” Well, I have the
brain of a small Simon on mine, and I use it to keep me going
on days when I feel my motivation slipping down the drain.

Sarah Rosenshine graduated in 2009 with a degree in English language

and literature. She was a Burton-­Judson team member for four years,
or five if you count overnighting a box of Mallomars from New York to
Chicago in 2010 (item 136). She works as a writer, where her writing has
appeared in the Onion, McSweeney’s, and the New Yorker, and as a software
developer, where her work has appeared on the internet.
I WANTED TO START OUT THIS BOOK WITH SARAH’S
essay about the four-­trampoline Simon game, because it’s the
story of an item that actually went the way it was supposed to.
Sometimes that happens, and it’s great. But it is just as likely (if
not more so) for an item to go horribly awry, sometimes to the
point where the Judges are not only confused or disappointed, but
where they wonder why they thought this whole thing would be a
good idea in the first place. Sometimes this happens when a team
misunderstands an item and very sweetly puts in a lot of effort
toward achieving the exact wrong result. Other times this happens
when a team purposefully lies or fakes an item in a desperate, low-­
effort grab for points.
One of the most egregious failed items I ever witnessed as a
Judge was one team’s “completion” of item 209 from the 2007 List.
The item asked for a million dollars in cash, which you’ve got to ad-
mit would be extremely cool to see. The team told us that they had
secured this, which sounded remarkable but of course not impos-
sible, because nothing is impossible for Scavvies. They told us that
the million dollars was in an armored van and that it would drive
past Judgment slowly so that we could see the cash, but it would
not stop. We all excitedly gathered on the sidewalk outside of Ida
Noyes. A van slowly approached. The windows rolled down. And
rather than show us a million dollars in the flesh, the Scavvies in-
side the van shot at us with water guns.
Needless to say, this received zero points.
Eventually, a word arose to describe these sorts of disappoint-
ments. Here, Adam Brozynski tells the story of how he helped de-
fine a quintessentially failed item completion.
ITEM 24:
The Trainwash

Adam Brozynski
2010 S CAV HU NT

As Scav teams go, MacPierce was not by any stretch of the

imagination what you’d call a powerhouse. We lacked for
manpower and materials, and we squandered what little
financial resources we had on booze. The highest compli-
ment we’d gotten was when a Judge declared us “adorably
janky.” MacPierce had little chance of ever winning, but we
also had little desire to do so.
It was around 11 p.m. on Saturday night of the 2010 Hunt,
and our team headquarters, TANSTAAFL, was abuzz with last-­
minute item completions.1 I had just finished putting a Star
Destroyer in a bottle for item 231 (“A ship in a bottle. Must be
Imperial class or better. [19 BBY points]”), and I was looking for
something else to work on when my friend Jasper approached
me and said, “Hey, Adam. You doing anything?”
“Nope.”
“Cool. I kinda want to do an item that’s around twelve
points and into which we can put absolutely no effort.”
Sounded good to me. We consulted our team’s master

1. TANSTAAFL was a cafe in the basement of Pierce Tower that also served as
MacPierce headquarters. Pronounced just the way it looks, the name is an acronym
for “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” in a nod to famed U of C economist
Milton Friedman. TANSTAAFL was permanently closed in 2011 due to a rat infestation,
yet continued to serve as Scav HQ until Pierce Tower was demolished in 2013. Maybe
Scavvies should be deterred by rats, but we’re not.
14 Adam Brozynski

copy of the List: sixteen sheets of paper affixed in two uneven

rows to a bare brick wall. After several abortive attempts (item
49: “Ballistic press-­on nails: fingernails that can be fired from
your hands to vaguely annoy attackers! [5 points]”) proved to
be too much of an engineering challenge to satisfy our “abso-
lutely no effort” criterion, we came across this gem:

24. That train is looking pretty grimy. Do me a favor and ride it through
a drive-­through trainwash. [12 points]

Now, we might have been fourth-­place contenders on a

good day, but we weren’t idiots. Of course it occurred to us
that somewhere in the great city of Chicago there might be a
location where actual trains are actually cleaned. It also oc-
curred to us that the Judges probably wanted us to find such a
location and ride a train through it. But, frankly, that’s not what
we were about that night. So we chose to ignore those facts. We
were going to make our own train and clean it in our own way.
“How can we make something that vaguely resembles a
train?” is one of those questions that you only ever find your-
self asking during Scav. “How can we make something that
vaguely resembles a train using only the materials within
fifty feet of us?” is a question you only ever find yourself ask-
ing during Scav and less than twelve hours before Judgment.
As MacPierce, naturally we had very few materials within
fifty feet of us, but we did have a shopping cart.
For the benefit of my readers who have never seen a
train before (and if you saw the final product of this item,
you would certainly place me in that category), we settled on
the following qualities as being hallmarks of a train: a train
is opaque, not grated like a shopping cart; a train has a cow
catcher in front; a train has wheels; a train has a smokestack.
Simple enough, right?
Our first step was to cover the shopping cart in trash
bags. In retrospect I’m not sure why this was necessary, but it
The Trainwash 15

seemed vitally important at the time. We found a half-­broken

crate for the cow catcher and a bucket for the smokestack. For
some reason we put the smokestack at the back of the train.
As I reflect on this process, I don’t recall either of us ever
actually looking at a picture of a train.
Finally, we needed some wheels. Fortunately, in the same
room was a fellow Scavvie working on item 84 who could
spare a couple of balloons. (Item 84, for the curious: “Balloon
animals are for those clowns in the social sciences! I want a
balloon protein, one that both represents your chosen protein’s
tertiary/quaternary structure and actively demonstrates its
native function. Like a real protein, your structure should be
sufficiently complex and, most importantly, do something cool
(none of that occludin-­β bullshit). [50 points]”)
So we blew up a couple of those long balloon-­animal
balloons, bent them into circles, and decided that would
suffice for wheels.
At that point, someone entered TANSTAAFL and asked
us, “Are you guys making a train?” That was all we needed.
Someone had, unprompted, positively identified our shop-
ping cart as a train. We immediately ceased construction.
This process had exhausted us. Somehow it had taken
two hours to quasi-­transform a shopping cart. Now, come
hell or high water, we were going to wash this train.
Having only the meager resources allotted to us by the
dorm, we opted to wash our train in the communal shower.
Jasper and I recruited some first years to help film this en-
deavor. One particularly brave individual volunteered to strip
to his underwear and ride the “train” through the shower.
And so we and the train piled into the elevator and
headed up to the third-­floor bathroom. One of our balloon
wheels popped in transit. We decided not to replace it.
We arrived at the third-­floor shower, our team’s only
video camera in hand. Our first year disrobed and mounted
16 Adam Brozynski

the shopping cart. I decided that the best way to convey

the facts that (a) this was a train and (b) we were cleaning it
would be to have the rest of us, standing off-­camera, prod
the shopping cart with brooms and mops and make train
noises. A lengthy debate followed about how many times we
should say “chugga” before each “choo-­choo.” (I will contend
until my dying breath that eight is the proper number.) That
dispute was left unresolved, so in the final filming each per-
son just said as many “chugga”s as they thought proper. We
recorded a thirty-­second video punctuated by a triumphal
cry of “this train is so clean!” and called it a wrap.
One of our captains that year, Rafael, presented that
page to the Judges the next day. We did not tell Rafael how
we had completed this particular item. We simply sent him
the file and assured him it was perfect.
The look on the Judge’s face upon seeing this video is
best described as “crestfallen.” I don’t think Rafael was too
impressed, either. Needless to say, we received no points.
But our completion of this item was not entirely in vain.
I was elected captain of MacPierce the following year, largely
on a pro-­trainwash platform. It became an inside joke on
our team: a “trainwashed” item was a low-­effort comple-
tion that flagrantly defied the Judges’ expectations. By 2015,
“trainwash” had entered the broader Scav lexicon.
Two years after this incident, a friend met the train-
wash Judge at a party, and the Judge shared his thoughts on
the item: “You know, I really love Scav. I’ve never seriously
thought about quitting being a Judge . . . except for that one
time when your team showed me that trainwash video.”
In my defense, though, that train was so clean.

Adam Brozynski majored in physics and graduated in 2012. He Scavved

with MacPierce and was a team captain in 2011 and 2012. He currently
lives in New York City, where he works as a software engineer.
THERE’S A LINE IN ADAM BROZYNSKI’S “TRAINWASH”
essay that could be said about the majority of what participants
do for Scav Hunt:
“In retrospect I’m not sure why this was necessary, but it
seemed vitally important at the time.”
In this way, Scav Hunt is just the nerdier version of more com-
monplace college traditions (like rushing a sorority or performing
organized cheers at football games): out of context, this behavior
is inexplicable, but within the community, no other option is imag-
inable. Scavvies know that they don’t have to cover a shopping cart
with garbage bags in the same way that fraternity members know
they don’t have to do a keg stand. But they go all in nonetheless,
because the group is counting on them, because it’s part of their
identities, because it’s tradition.
How did Scav reach this rarified standing after its origins as
a vaguely normal collegiate activity? In this next essay, one of the
creators of the first Hunt provides some backstory on how we got
here.
 ITEM 175:
The First Hunt

Diane A. Kelly
1987 S CAV HU NT

Compared to the elaborate items Scav has challenged teams

to obtain over the years, an aluminum soda can seems or-
dinary, ubiquitous, some might say boring. But the efforts
teams made to get their hands on one during the first Scav-
enger Hunt ultimately inspired one of the event’s longest-­
running traditions.
In the fall of 1986, Chris Straus had come up with the
idea of running a scavenger hunt on campus during May’s
“Summer Breeze,” the university’s annual arts festival. I was
recruited to his team of organizers when my friend Cassie
Scharff poked her head into my room and said, “Hey Diane,
we’re going to plan a scavenger hunt, and you should help!”
At the time, I was struggling to juggle a work-­study job at the
Regenstein with the most challenging classes I’d ever faced,
but I said yes anyway. I loved games, and this sounded like it
could be even more fun than the string of raucous Assassin
games I’d run in the halls between classes in high school.
So from then on, I joined a small group of Chris’s friends
and friends-­of-­friends around a table in the Reynolds Club
every week, spitballing ideas for items and figuring out how
we were going to run this thing.
We really had no idea what we were doing.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The mother's
recompense
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Title: The mother's recompense

Author: Edith Wharton

Release date: January 1, 2024 [eBook #72573]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1924

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, David E. Brown, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

MOTHER'S RECOMPENSE ***
THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE
 By EDITH WHARTON
THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE
OLD NEW YORK
False Dawn
The Old Maid
The Spark
New Year’s Day
THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
SUMMER
THE REEF
THE MARNE
FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING
 THE MOTHER’S
RECOMPENSE
BY
EDITH WHARTON
Author of
“Old New York,” “The Age of Innocence,”
“The Glimpses of the Moon,” etc.

Desolation is a delicate thing.

Shelley.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXV
 COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1924, 1925 by The Pictorial Review Company

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
My excuses are due to the decorous shade of Grace
Aguilar, loved of our grandmothers, for deliberately
appropriating, and applying to uses so different, the title of
one of the most admired of her tales.
E. W.
BOOK I.
 THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE
I.
KATE CLEPHANE was wakened, as usual, by the slant of Riviera
sun across her bed.
It was the thing she liked best about her shabby cramped room in
the third-rate Hôtel de Minorque et de l’Univers: that the morning sun
came in at her window, and yet that it didn’t come too early.
No more sunrises for Kate Clephane. They were associated with too
many lost joys—coming home from balls where one had danced
one’s self to tatters, or from suppers where one had lingered,
counting one’s winnings (it was wonderful, in the old days, how often
she had won, or friends had won for her, staking a louis just for fun,
and cramming her hands with thousand franc bills); associated, too,
with the scramble up hill through the whitening gray of the garden,
flicked by scented shrubs, caught on perfidious prickles, up to the
shuttered villa askew on its heat-soaked rock—and then, at the door,
in the laurustinus-shade that smelt of honey, that unexpected kiss
(well honestly, yes, unexpected, since it had long been settled that
one was to remain “just friends”); and the pulling away from an
insistent arm, and the one more pressure on hers of lips young
enough to be fresh after a night of drinking and play and more
drinking. And she had never let Chris come in with her at that hour,
no, not once, though at the time there was only Julie the cook in the
house, and goodness knew.... Oh, but she had always had her pride
—people ought to remember that when they said such things about
her....
That was what the sunrise reminded Kate Clephane of—as she
supposed it did most women of forty-two or so (or was it really forty-
four last week?) For nearly twenty years now she had lived chiefly
with women of her own kind, and she no longer very sincerely
believed there were any others, that is to say among women
properly so called. Her female world was made up of three
categories: frumps, hypocrites and the “good sort”—like herself. After
all, the last was the one she preferred to be in.
Not that she could not picture another life—if only one had met the
right man at the right hour. She remembered her one week—that tiny
little week of seven days, just six years ago—when she and Chris
had gone together to a lost place in Normandy where there wasn’t a
railway within ten miles, and you had to drive in the farmer’s cart to
the farm-house smothered in apple-blossoms; and Chris and she
had gone off every morning for the whole day, while he sketched by
willowy river-banks, and under the flank of mossy village churches;
and every day for seven days she had watched the farm-yard life
waking at dawn under their windows, while she dashed herself with
cold water and did her hair and touched up her face before he was
awake, because the early light is so pitiless after thirty. She
remembered it all, and how sure she had been then that she was
meant to live on a farm and keep chickens; just as sure as he was
that he was meant to be a painter, and would already have made a
name if his parents hadn’t called him back to Baltimore and shoved
him into a broker’s office after Harvard—to have him off their minds,
as he said.
Yes, she could still picture that kind of life: every fibre in her kept its
glow. But she didn’t believe in it; she knew now that “things didn’t
happen like that” for long, that reality and durability were attributes of
the humdrum, the prosaic and the dreary. And it was to escape from
reality and durability that one plunged into cards, gossip, flirtation,
and all the artificial excitements which society so lavishly provides for
people who want to forget.
She and Chris had never repeated that week. He had never
suggested doing so, and had let her hints fall unheeded, or turned
them off with a laugh, whenever she tried, with shy tentative
allusions, to coax him back to the idea; for she had found out early
that one could never ask him anything point-blank—it just put his
back up, as he said himself. One had to manœuvre and wait; but
when didn’t a woman have to manœuvre and wait? Ever since she
had left her husband, eighteen years ago, what else had she ever
done? Sometimes, nowadays, waking alone and unrefreshed in her
dreary hotel room, she shivered at the memory of all the scheming,
planning, ignoring, enduring, accepting, which had led her in the end
to—this.
Ah, well—
“Aline!”
After all, there was the sun in her window, there was the triangular
glimpse of blue wind-bitten sea between the roofs, and a new day
beginning, and hot chocolate coming, and a new hat to try on at the
milliner’s, and—
“Aline!”
She had come to this cheap hotel just in order to keep her maid. One
couldn’t afford everything, especially since the war, and she
preferred veal for dinner every night to having to do her own
mending and dress her hair: the unmanageable abundant hair which
had so uncannily survived her youth, and sometimes, in her happier
moods, made her feel that perhaps, after all, in the eyes of her
friends, other of its attributes survived also. And besides, it looked
better for a lone woman who, after having been thirty-nine for a
number of years, had suddenly become forty-four, to have a
respectable-looking servant in the background; to be able, for
instance, when one arrived in new places, to say to supercilious
hotel-clerks: “My maid is following with the luggage.”
“Aline!”
Aline, ugly, neat and enigmatic, appeared with the breakfast-tray. A
delicious scent preceded her.
Mrs. Clephane raised herself on a pink elbow, shook her hair over
her shoulders, and exclaimed: “Violets?”
Aline permitted herself her dry smile. “From a gentleman.”
Colour flooded her mistress’s face. Hadn’t she known that something
good was going to happen to her that morning—hadn’t she felt it in
every touch of the sunshine, as its golden finger-tips pressed her lids
open and wound their way through her hair? She supposed she was
superstitious. She laughed expectantly.
“A gentleman?”
“The little lame boy with the newspapers that Madame was kind to,”
the maid continued, arranging the tray with her spare Taylorized
gestures.
“Oh, poor child!” Mrs. Clephane’s voice had a quaver which she tried
to deflect to the lame boy, though she knew how impossible it was to
deceive Aline. Of course Aline knew everything—well, yes, that was
the other side of the medal. She often said to her mistress: “Madame
is too much alone—Madame ought to make some new friends—”
and what did that mean, except that Aline knew she had lost the old
ones?
But it was characteristic of Kate that, after a moment, the quaver in
her voice did instinctively tilt in the direction of the lame boy who sold
newspapers; and when the tears reached her eyes it was over his
wistful image, and not her own, that they flowed. She had a way of
getting desperately fond of people she had been kind to, and
exaggeratedly touched by the least sign of their appreciation. It was
her weakness—or her strength: she wondered which?
“Poor, poor little chap. But his mother’ll beat him if she finds out.
Aline, you must hunt him up this very day and pay back what the
flowers must have cost him.” She lifted the violets and pressed them
to her face. As she did so she caught sight of a telegram beneath
them.
A telegram—for her? It didn’t often happen nowadays. But after all
there was no reason why it shouldn’t happen once again—at least
once. There was no reason why, this very day, this day on which the
sunshine had waked her with such a promise, there shouldn’t be a
message at last, the message for which she had waited for two
years, three years; yes, exactly three years and one month—just a
word from him to say: “Take me back.”
She snatched up the telegram, and then turned her head toward the
wall, seeking, while she read, to hide her face from Aline. The maid,
on whom such hints were never lost, immediately transferred her
attention to the dressing-table, skilfully deploying the glittering troops
on that last battlefield where the daily struggle still renewed itself.
Aline’s eyes averted, her mistress tore open the blue fold and read:
“Mrs. Clephane dead—”
A shiver ran over her. Mrs. Clephane dead? Not if Mrs. Clephane
knew it! Never more alive than today, with the sun crisping her hair,
the violet scent enveloping her, and that jolly north-west gale rioting
out there on the Mediterranean. What was the meaning of this grim
joke?
The first shock over, she read on more calmly and understood. It
was the other Mrs. Clephane who was dead: the one who used to be
her mother-in-law. Her first thought was: “Well, serve her right”—
since, if it was so desirable to be alive on such a morning it must be
correspondingly undesirable to be dead, and she could draw the
agreeable conclusion that the other Mrs. Clephane had at last been
come up with—oh, but thoroughly.
She lingered awhile on this pleasing fancy, and then began to reach
out to wider inferences. “But if—but if—but little Anne—”
At the murmur of the name her eyes filled again. For years now she
had barricaded her heart against her daughter’s presence; and here
it was, suddenly in possession again, crowding out everything else,
yes, effacing even Chris as though he were the thinnest of ghosts,
and the cable in her hand a cock-crow. “But perhaps now they’ll let
me see her,” the mother thought.
She didn’t even know who “they” were, now that their formidable
chieftain, her mother-in-law, was dead. Lawyers, judges, trustees,
guardians, she supposed—all the natural enemies of woman. She
wrinkled her brows, trying to remember who, at the death of the
child’s father, had been appointed the child’s other guardian—old
Mrs. Clephane’s overpowering assumption of the office having so
completely effaced her associate that it took a few minutes to fish
him up out of the far-off past.
“Why, poor old Fred Landers, of course!” She smiled retrospectively.
“I don’t believe he’d prevent my seeing the child if he were left to
himself. Besides, isn’t she nearly grown up? Why, I do believe she
must be.”
The telegram fell from her hands, both of which she now impressed
into a complicated finger-reckoning of how old little Anne must be, if
Chris were thirty-three, as he certainly was—no, thirty-one, he
couldn’t be more than thirty-one, because she, Kate, was only forty-
two ... yes, forty-two ... and she’d always acknowledged to herself
that there were nine years between them; no, eleven years, if she
were really forty-two; yes, but was she? Or, goodness, was she
actually forty-five? Well, then, if she was forty-five—just supposing it
for a minute—and had married John Clephane at twenty-one, as she
knew she had, and little Anne had been born the second summer
afterward, then little Anne must be nearly twenty ... why, quite twenty,
wasn’t it? But then, how old would that make Chris? Oh, well, he
must be older than he looked ... she’d always thought he was. That
boyish way of his, she had sometimes fancied, was put on to make
her imagine there was a greater difference of age between them
than there really was—a device he was perfectly capable of making
use of for ulterior purposes. And of course she’d never been that
dreadful kind of woman they called a “baby-snatcher”.... But if Chris
were thirty-one, and she forty-five, then how old was Anne?
With impatient fingers she began all over again.
The maid’s voice, seeming to come from a long way off, respectfully
reminded her that the chocolate would be getting cold. Mrs.
Clephane roused herself, looked about the room, and exclaimed:
“My looking-glass, please.” She wanted to settle that question of
ages.
As Aline approached with the glass there was a knock at the door.
The maid went to it, and came back with her small inward smile.
“Another telegram.”
Another? This time Mrs. Clephane sat bolt upright. What could it be,
now, but a word from him, a message at last? Oh, but she was
ashamed of herself for thinking of such a thing at such a moment.
Solitude had demoralized her, she supposed. And then her child was
so far away, so invisible, so unknown—and Chris of a sudden had
become so near and real again, though it was three whole years and
one month since he had left her. And at her age—She opened the
second message, trembling. Since Armistice Day her heart had not
beat so hard.
“New York. Dearest mother,” it ran, “I want you to come home at
once. I want you to come and live with me. Your daughter Anne.”
“You asked for the looking-glass, Madame,” Aline patiently reminded
her.
Mrs. Clephane took the proffered glass, stared into it with eyes at
first unseeing, and then gradually made out the reflection of her
radiant irrepressible hair, a new smile on her lips, the first streak of
gray on her temples, and the first tears—oh, she couldn’t remember
for how long—running down over her transfigured face.
“Aline—” The maid was watching her with narrowed eyes. “The
Rachel powder, please—”
Suddenly she dropped the glass and the powder-puff, buried her
face in her hands, and sobbed.
 II.
SHE went out an hour later, her thoughts waltzing and eddying like
the sunlit dust which the wind kept whirling round the corners in
spasmodic gusts. Everything in her mind was hot and cold, and
beating and blowing about, like the weather on that dancing draughty
day; the very pavement of the familiar streets, and the angles of the
buildings, seemed to be spinning with the rest, as if the heaviest
substances had suddenly grown imponderable.
“It must,” she thought, “be a little like the way the gravestones will
behave on the Day of Judgment.”
To make sure of where she was she had to turn down one of the
white streets leading to the sea, and fix her eyes on that wedge of
blue between the houses, as if it were the only ballast to her brain,
the only substantial thing left. “I’m glad it’s one of the days when the
sea is firm,” she thought. The glittering expanse, flattened by the
gale and solidified by the light, rose up to meet her as she walked
toward it, the pavement lifting her and flying under her like wings till it
dropped her down in the glare of the Promenade, where the top-
knots of the struggling palms swam on the wind like chained and
long-finned sea-things against that sapphire wall climbing half-way
up the sky.
She sat down on a bench, clinging sideways as if lashed to a boat’s
deck, and continued to steady her eyes on the Mediterranean. To
collect her thoughts she tried to imagine that nothing had happened,
that neither of the two cables had come, and that she was preparing
to lead her usual life, as mapped out in the miniature engagement-
book in her hand-bag. She had her “set” now in the big Riviera town
where she had taken refuge in 1916, after the final break with Chris,
and where, after two years of war-work and a “Reconnaissance
Française” medal, she could carry her head fairly high, and even
condescend a little to certain newcomers.
She drew forth the engagement-book, smiling at her childish game of
“pretending.” At eleven, a hat to try on; eleven-thirty, a dress; from
then to two o’clock, nothing; at two, a slow solemn drive with poor
old Mrs. Minity (in the last-surviving private victoria in the town); tea
and bridge at Countess Lanska’s from four to six; a look in at the
Rectory of the American church, where there was a Ladies’ Guild
meeting about the Devastated Regions’ Fancy Fair; lastly a little
dinner at the Casino, with the Horace Betterlys and a few other pals.
Yes—a rather-better-than-the-average day. And now—Why, now she
could kick over the whole apple-cart if she chose; chuck it all (except
the new dress and hat!): the tedious drive with the prosy patronizing
old woman; the bridge, which was costing her more than it ought,
with that third-rate cosmopolitan set of Laura Lanska’s; the long
discussion at the Rectory as to whether it would “do” to ask Mrs.
Schlachtberger to take a stall at the Fair in spite of her unfortunate
name; and the little dinner with the Horace Betterlys and their dull
noisy friends, who wanted to “see life” and didn’t know that you can’t
see it unless you’ve first had the brains to imagine it.... Yes, she
could drop it all now, and never never see one of them again....
“My daughter ... my daughter Anne.... Oh, you don’t know my little
girl? She has changed, hasn’t she? Growing up is a way the children
have.... Yes, it is ageing for a poor mother to trot about such a young
giantess.... Oh, I’m going gray already, you know—here, on the
temples. Fred Landers? It is you, really? Dear old Fred! No, of
course I’ve never forgotten you.... Known me anywhere? You would?
Oh, nonsense! Look at my gray hair. But men don’t change—lucky
men! Why, I remember even that Egyptian seal-ring of yours.... My
daughter ... my daughter Anne ... let me introduce you to this big girl
of mine ... my little Anne....”
It was curious: for the first time she realized that, in thinking back
over the years since she had been parted from Anne, she seldom,
nowadays, went farther than the episode with Chris. Yet it was long
before—it was eighteen years ago—that she had “lost” Anne: “lost”
was the euphemism she had invented (as people called the Furies
The Amiable Ones), because a mother couldn’t confess, even to her
most secret self, that she had willingly deserted her child. Yet that
was what she had done; and now her thoughts, shrinking and
shivering, were being forced back upon the fact. She had left Anne